Gate 3 — Difficulty at the Beginning — Order Born from Chaos

Full breakdown

The fundamental challenge of initiation — to overcome confusion and establish order.

Gate 3 is extraordinary. If you want a proper meditation, sit with what's written above the lines for about half a lifetime. This is life itself — overcoming confusion and establishing order. We're endlessly occupied with establishing order on this planet. That's what we've been doing since the beginning, and faster and faster we're bringing everything around us in our great village under this order. The third hexagram represents this process, inherent to life as a whole. Life is the overcoming of confusion, bewilderment, and disorder. It matters for all of us to understand: there's nothing wrong with life throwing us into confusion. Life is sheer muddle and confusion.

The longer I live, the better I understand how much living it takes to grasp what this disorder of life actually is, and the confusion that comes with it. What matters is that this disorder and its accompanying confusion aren't our enemies. Disorder and confusion are natural before a mutation occurs. Mutation is born out of this chaos. From here comes a new order — one that can't be equated with a simple settling of things or a new form of control. It's a new order in the sense that gate 3 represents the potential for life's genetic mutation. These are the children who come into the world with a new genetic combination. As our planet has globalized, we've globalized the mating process along with it. The genes of the entire Earth's population are mixing, and in the 20th century the widest variety of unions created entirely new combinations in the gene pool. This is how the new order is represented. In this new order of genetic material, our ongoing responsibility as a species for our own survival is expressed — we survive through genetic diversity. The essence of life is disorder, confusion, bewilderment. But our purpose is to overcome them and establish order.

When people come to Human Design, they're always in this kind of confusion, caused by disorder. It's an objective state — evidence that they can't make sense of, understand, or know what it means to be themselves and why they live the way they do rather than some other way. The bewilderment and confusion that humanity as a whole goes through can be overcome, and order can ultimately be found. I remind my students of the Delphic Oracle. Above its entrance was written: "Know Thyself." This function is primary. Life itself isn't all that disordered, isn't all that confused or bewildered about itself — but being human in this world, and staying alive, is what always throws us off.